My sweet Easter indulgence

After all, what is not to love about chocolate? It's most probably the one sweet indulgence that has kept scientist going for years trying to figure out why it has such "feel good" properties!

Much has been written about the significance of the egg during Easter celebrations, but for me, Easter has a very different meaning and most probably the most important thing for me at Easter is that we as a family can get together and spend some time together over good food and, of course, lots and lots of chocolate!

To be quite honest with you, I'm not a big Easter egg fan, I love the little marshmallow eggs and have been guilty of eating far too many of those, but the hollow eggs don't do it for me. Don't get me wrong, I love chocolate, the darker the better, and I have loads of recipes here to prove my affection for it. This chocolate pudding in a mug is so easy, so cheap and yet it can stop the toughest chocolate craving in its tracks. Tell me, who can resist a chocolate eclair, certainly not me! For a midnight craving, I suggest you make loads of these chocolate samoosas and keep them in the freezer. When the cravings hit you, just pop a few in the fryer and voila, all sorted.

Before I share my recipe for today's tart, I want to share something else with you. My gran used to make flans. I don't know how many of you are familiar with the flan, but basically it was a soft vanilla sponge base and had to be filled with either berry compote, caramel and banana or tinned peaches and cream. My gran, however, made a ginger tart. I would imagine the ginger tart filling was some kind of custard or something, but as children we hated it. Nothing was worse than biting into a piece of tart and finding out halfway through the process that "Gran caught you again"; it was indeed ginger and not banana and caramel, which was our favourite.

I am not quite sure if even today I could stomach that ginger flan, but I have grown to love ginger in all sorts of things and just to make it up to my gran, I added ginger to my chocolate tart.

Chocolate Tart with Fresh Figs (Makes one big 25cm tart or six smaller ones)
Ingredients
For the crust:

• 2x200g ginger biscuits
  
• 50g crystallised ginger (optional)
  
• 80g butter - melted

Method

Place the ginger biscuits and crystallised ginger in a food processor and process until you have fine crumbs. Press the crumbs into a 25cm loose-bottomed tart pan or six individual pans. Place the tart bases in the fridge to harden slightly.

For more Easter recipes, go to www.my-easy-cooking.com